Tag: Trump vs Clinton

Nate Silver is describing the current state of the US presidential election as a blowout, with a pronounced gender gap in voting intentions.

Clinton leads Trump by 15 percentage points among women while trailing him [Trump] by 5 points among men.

But the contest has been one-sided from the start with Clinton´s chances of winning widening continuously as shown by Predictwise.

With more Republican (24) than Democratic (10) seats up for grab in November, and many of the former seen to be vulnerable, a Trump effect could lead to Democrats regaining control of the Senate (a 72% possibility). The 30-year trend from 1985 (the 99th Senate) to 2015 (the 114th) is shown below.

The current balance in the Congress is 246 Republican and 186 Democratic voting members. A swing to Clinton should translate to more seats in the Congress helped by net Republican retirements but muted by some gerrymandering of Democratic seat boundaries. It might depend on how much Republican congressional hopefuls can distance themselves from Trump´s misogyny. But a substantial reduction in a Republic majority would make Clinton´s job much easier than that faced by President Obama during his two terms.

But what would or could a President Clinton do with this apparent advantage?

Misogyny is one – albeit especially nasty – feature of rising economic inequality and insecurity, exclusion and public disengagement, driven largely by the neoliberal orthodoxy over the past 30 years, and by a political and business elite in the US as in Europe that are seen to have lost their legitimacy. A new social contract that demonstrably reduces poverty and injustice is needed. Can the Clinton Presidency put together such a new deal coalition?